choad wrote:

I think this is just the gubmint throwing in the towel. They haven't had the best lawyers or PR machines for years while at the same time outsourcing so much of their function to for-profit companies that they don't even know how to fight the real machine any more. So why make rules that have more loopholes than grannies crochet project and will just get laughed at by Wall Street and Madison Avenue alike?

Reporters, for all their flaws, tend to understand what’s happening in their own newsrooms. It’s their job to try to see things clearly. Often, what they see in their workplaces is low salaries, inept management and poor communication — ills that plague many workplaces across America. For more than two years now, online media outlets have been unionizing as a way to make our industry better. This week, we learned just how horrifying some rich people find the idea of employees coming together to improve their workplace.

Joe Ricketts, the founder of TD Ameritrade whose family owns the Chicago Cubs, is worth more than $2 billion. He is the owner of DNAinfo, a local news site that covered New York City and Chicago with unparalleled skill, as well as Gothamist, a network of city-oriented websites that DNAinfo bought this year. He is also a major right-wing political donor of rather flexible morality. During the last presidential primaries, Mr. Ricketts spent millions of dollars funding ads that portrayed Donald Trump as an untrustworthy, dangerous misogynist. Once Mr. Trump secured the nomination, Mr. Ricketts spent a million dollars to support him.

One might think that such flexibility would allow Mr. Ricketts to bend but not break when faced with every plutocrat’s worst nightmare: a few dozen modestly paid employees who collectively bargain for better working conditions.

Alas, no.

Six months ago, reporters and editors at DNAinfo-Gothamist announced their intent to join the Writers Guild of America, East. This is the union that my colleagues and I at Gawker Media joined in 2015, and the union that has organized major online media companies like HuffPost, Vice Media, Slate and Thrillist in the past two years. In that short amount of time, unionized “new media” workers have won substantial raises, editorial protections and other improvements that writers at more mature companies take for granted. In defiance of the conventional wisdom that unions are outdated, this young, high-tech industry has been one of the most visible recent successes for organized labor in America.

The DNAinfo-Gothamist announcement sparked a zealous anti-union campaign: Management threatened employees by saying that Joe Ricketts might shut the whole place down if it unionized. Nevertheless, employees last week voted 25-2 in favor of unionization. And on Thursday, Mr. Ricketts abruptly shut the whole place down.

It is worth being clear about exactly what happened here, so that no one gets too smug. DNAinfo was never profitable, but Mr. Ricketts was happy to invest in it for eight years, praising its work all along. Gothamist, on the other hand, was profitable, and a fairly recent addition to the company. One week after the New York team unionized, Mr. Ricketts shut it all down. He did not try to sell the company to someone else. Instead of bargaining with 27 unionized employees in New York City, he chose to lay off 115 people across America. And, as a final thumb in the eye, he initially pulled the entire site’s archives down (they are now back up), so his newly unemployed workers lost access to their published work. Then, presumably, he went to bed in his $29 million apartment.

Of all the lies spouted during the DNAinfo-Gothamist anti-union campaign, none was more transparent than a spokeswoman’s assertion that the union was a “competitive obstacle making it harder for the business to be financially successful.” The company never made money before it was unionized, but more important, the new union hadn’t made a single demand yet.

Joe Ricketts himself wrote that “unions promote a corrosive us-against-them dynamic that destroys the esprit de corps businesses need to succeed.” How’s that esprit de corps now, Mr. Ricketts?

Not to lecture these free-enterprise experts on economics, but the idea that employees like those at DNAinfo-Gothamist have any incentive to bankrupt their own employer is ridiculous. They work there. They have a robust incentive to make the workplace better. Their success is tied to the success of the company.

Labor unions have done more for the average American than all the rich industrialists put together. Unions are a legal right and the single most powerful tool that regular working people have to improve their lot. DNAinfo and Gothamist employees, who did the fundamentally important work of telling us all what is happening in our cities, were punished for exercising their rights.

The business of journalism has always been fickle and grim. It is an industry full of idealist workers scrambling to cobble together a living at publications owned by a shifting group of cutthroat capitalists and incompetent rich dilettantes. The careers of most journalists feature constant uncertainty and heartbreak, interspersed with periods of life-affirming work that you hope make it all worthwhile. That uncertainty is why The Los Angeles Times, whose owners have been famously anti-union for more than 100 years, is now in the midst of its own union organizing campaign.

The union movement in media is incredibly important beyond what it means to hundreds of employees at more than a dozen sites. Digital media workers have unionized because they understand how they are being exploited at work, and how to fix it. The visibility of their union campaigns can serve as an example to workers in other job sectors, where organized labor has grown nearly invisible, to the detriment of all.

Just as the newspaper industry unionized in the 1930s to balance out the outlandish power of the publishers, so too will the online news industry unionize whether the bosses like it or not. Mr. Ricketts and other publishers will continue to fight back, framing their opposition to unions as an informed business decision. But it is an ideological one.

Unions, like free speech, fall under the heading of "I would never do that but I would defend to the death your right to do that". People should be free to organize. Business owners should be free to can their asses if they have better options. In the middle should be justice.

While there may be a statute of limitations on spanking, there is no statute of limitations on bringing it up.

"I called the doctor and asked what should do, and he said 'calm her down,'" Ayers told The Star. He then asked the doctor if spanking would work, and the doctor said yes. Ayers said he did not remember the name of the doctor.

...A family of conservative multimillionaires owns Sinclair Broadcast Group. And Sinclair Broadcast Group is on the cusp of owning enough local television stations to reach 70 percent of American households. Every news station under Sinclair’s umbrella is required to syndicate commentary that comports with its owners’ ideological views. Over the past 13 months, this has meant regularly providing viewers with the insights of Sinclair’s chief political analyst, former Trump spokesman Boris Epshteyn. It has also meant featuring analysis from conservative pundit Mark Hyman, and updates from the “Terrorism Alert Desk” (sensationalized coverage of recent terror attacks from around the world) on a routine basis...

Baywolfe wrote:

We should have seen this coming. First Ted Turner turns TBS into the first national mega-station. Then it's suddenly OK to own newspapers and TV stations in the same market.

You could hear its death knell in the late 70s and early 80s, if you were listening. Smaller market newspapers got hit first, with wave after wave of predatory buyouts roughly coinciding with tech evolution. I could have this wrong but I think it was population density what did it. People no longer knew or much cared where they lived, stopped participating in their communities, and relied on nyc and hollyweird for most of their news and entertainment.

choad wrote:

Baywolfe wrote:

We should have seen this coming. First Ted Turner turns TBS into the first national mega-station. Then it's suddenly OK to own newspapers and TV stations in the same market.

You could hear its death knell in the late 70s and early 80s, if you were listening. Smaller market newspapers got hit first, with wave after wave of predatory buyouts roughly coinciding with tech evolution. I could have this wrong but I think it was population density what did it. People no longer knew or much cared where they lived, stopped participating in their communities, and relied on nyc and hollyweird for most of their news and entertainment.

You're not wrong. I think most of it can be blamed on the glass teat. Why read when you can absorb?

Baywolfe wrote:

choad wrote:

This is what absolutely throttles me about Trump and his hard-on with the New York Times. I get that he has no clue what journalistic integrity is and doesn't understand the whole vetting process with multiple sources, but it seems like the whole world's just a TV program to that guy, isn't it?

Baywolfe wrote:

choad wrote:

This is what absolutely throttles me about Trump and his hard-on with the New York Times. I get that he has no clue what journalistic integrity is and doesn't understand the whole vetting process with multiple sources, but it seems like the whole world's just a TV program to that guy, isn't it?

The NYT has done us all no favors feeding its partisan pandering to the outrage without adding a fucking thing to the discussion.

It’s a shocking thing, to see something as open and vast as the internet become the ultimate weapon of the narrow-minded. Instead of knowing more about the world, people have used the internet to create worlds of their own and fully inhabit them. Facts are incidental, if not detrimental, to these worlds.

George Orr wrote:

It’s a shocking thing, to see something as open and vast as the internet become the ultimate weapon of the narrow-minded. Instead of knowing more about the world, people have used the internet to create worlds of their own and fully inhabit them. Facts are incidental, if not detrimental, to these worlds.

Never has the value of a solid, traditional education been more important, providing people (or those who paid attention anyway) with critical thinking skills. It's quite obvious who posses those skills, and who lacks them. Yes, the internet is full of garbage, but I personally am vastly better informed -- about everything -- than at any time earlier in my life; the internet has made mind my mind more powerful rather than less. But I have those critical skills (as does virtually everyone who posts here, I believe).

I don't think we can accurately discuss and fathom the ambient mendacity of our times without viewing it in a historical context. Americans in large numbers (although not a majority), after thirty plus years of economic decline capped by a financial collapse which wiped out most of their equity and savings, are behaving similarly to the Germans and Italians in the period between the World Wars. And after they too suffered a similar economic devastation.

I don't think the number of idiots has increased in recent times. And I don't think the internet is nearly as responsible for what we're seeing happen as the times in which we live. Prior to the internet, it was Rush Limbaugh on AM radio.

It's all Twitter now. The United States is leading the way against actual press conferences and conducting all policy via Twitter. Again, I understand that these are all symptoms of the fall of our Republic and not the causes but it's sad never the less.

McClatchy, the chain that owns 30 US newspapers including the Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star, The Sacramento Bee, The Charlotte Observer, The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram has filed for bankruptcy protection.

Baywolfe wrote:

McClatchy, the chain that owns 30 US newspapers including the Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star, The Sacramento Bee, The Charlotte Observer, The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram has filed for bankruptcy protection.

Linda Guest, senior HR Manager wrote:

"On June 26, 2018, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announced its decision to become a digital news organization. (See attached letter). As part of that decision, the Post-Gazette's print operations would be phased out. On August 25, 2018, the Company eliminated two days of print [Tuesdays and Saturdays]. The Union has previously been informed that additional print days will be eliminated in 2019.

"The Company has decided to eliminate two additional print days [Mondays and Wednesdays] on September 30, 2019 as it continues the transition to a digital-only newspaper. . . ."

Very sad, I think they're going about it all wrong. The Dallas Morning News offers daily delivery or morning and evening digital newspapers. We were early adopters, even bought new tablets, which paid for themselves in about three months.

The Telegraph, The Sun and The Times declined to publish, but other national titles revealed their figures as normal, including The Daily Express, The Daily Mirror, The Guardian, The Daily Star and The i Paper.

The Daily Mail had the highest sales of the papers which published, with a circulation of 945,000 - down from 1.13 million in March. . . .

After the announcement that some papers would not publish their figures, The Guardian's media editor Jim Waterson said: "This is a genius move. Can't write about the decline in print newspaper sales if there's no longer evidence that print newspaper sales are actually declining!

"Entirely coincidentally, pre-Covid this was due to be the month the Sun lost its title as UK's biggest selling newspaper after 40+ years to Daily Mail. Now we've... no idea," he added.

Readership used to equal quality of the material. Now it represents the confirmation bias of the readers. It's as meaningless as saying that Fox News is better than "X" News because the ratings are higher. Pandering is still pandering.